Soft Index
I made a browser-based pottery wheel.
You spin up a lump of digital clay, push it around, and walk away with a high-res poster of whatever you make.
Go play with it HERE.
Claude Opus 4.8 and Gemini 3.5 Flash landed the same week. Everyone's on and on about vibe coding being even easier now, so I figured this space needed a little experiment.
So, I've always had a soft spot for minimalist posters built around big bold shapes on simple backgrounds.
Blobs, basically. This kind of thing.
Originally I set out to build a blob generator (tastefully and artfully, of course). But every version felt boring. Just a dashboard of sliders.
And that's where it clicked: pottery! A wheel. Spin it up, push the clay, watch it lean too far and collapse.
Make a shape with your hands (your mouse cursor actually), not just numbers and settings.
Throw some clay. Save your high-res posters. That's the whole thing.
I added a lighting slider you can push up to catch more of a raw primitive 3D texture. Or, my favorite: drag the lighting to zero, flip the color toggle to paper, and just make big dumb graphic shapes.
Look, it's a throwaway. A quick experiment. But it left me with two thoughts I can't shake:
One: the entire thing is a single 45kb HTML file. One file. That's it. It feels like the early-2000s internet I miss. The era of weird little custom micro-sites people built with whatever janky tool they had lying around. Maybe that's coming back to a certain extent?
Two: for the last twenty years we mostly built software for everyone. Maybe the next twenty are about building software for one person. A pricing calculator for your side hustle. A flashcard thing for one specific exam. A widget to measure the weird seam on your gym shorts. One-size-fits-all is on its way out.
Anyway. Go throw some clay.